


The Clay in her Claws

by LostOzian



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Consent Play, Cult of the Signless Sufferer, F/F, Legislacerators, lifestyle d/s
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-13
Updated: 2015-01-13
Packaged: 2018-03-07 09:18:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3169574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LostOzian/pseuds/LostOzian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Your name is Terezi—sorry, Neophyte Pyrope. And you have been Legislacerator Redglare’s apprentice for almost a sweep. Studying under Redglare is like nothing you ever dreamed: you two exist in a world all of your own, where logic rules the day and Redglare knows best. You follow, learning whatever you can, both about the office of the Legislacerator and about Redglare herself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Clay in her Claws

**Author's Note:**

  * For [uumiho](https://archiveofourown.org/users/uumiho/gifts).



Your name is Terezi—sorry, Neophyte Pyrope. And you have been Legislacerator Redglare’s apprentice for almost a sweep.

Minutes before nightfall, your alarm bracelet rings. You unwrap yourself from Redglare’s arms, lift out of the recuperacoon, wipe the slime from your body with a small towel, and dress yourself. You brush your hair and set out the breakfast that Redglare procured the night before—today, some grubloaf and hard lactic culture—as well as a fresh towelette. If you finish this duty before Redglare wakes, then you are to sit quietly and meditate on the night ahead of you. Remember things Redglare has shown you. Contemplate what those things mean. Ponder what should be done next.

If Redglare sleeps late, you are to wake her, but she never sleeps late. She ignores your alarm as if it did not exist, but the instant hers rings she hoists herself from the sopor and steps onto the floor.

“Good evening, Neophyte,” she says.

“Good evening, Legislacerator Redglare,” you reply.

You stand and use the towel to dry Redglare’s body. You smell the impossible savory aloe of her blood beneath her skin, beneath your hands. You share a blood caste, but you know your blood does not smell anywhere near as beautiful as Redglare’s. With carefully practiced motions, you dry every inch of her, from the gaps in her toes to the back of her ears, and you relish the feel of her muscles. You have to hold your breath when you dry sensitive areas: the cleft of her ass and the crevasse of her bone bulge, but your hands do not falter. A legislacerator never hesitates, even when nervous. The only motion Redglare performs to assist you is lifting the chain of her pendant as you dry her neck.

“Thank you, Neophyte,” Redglare says when you are finished.

You bow your head. “My pleasure, Legislacerator.”

Redglare dresses herself in her uniform swiftly, brushes her own hair, and then sits and divides the food for the both of you. You have never smelled portions so equal in your entire life. Redglare measures three times and cuts once for your benefit, and it makes your blood pusher thump harder to think she cares about you that much.

“Now, what should we do next? Advise me on a course of action,” Redglare commands. You answer with all of your meditations, synthesizing the evidence already gathered and proposing what to do. Redglare questions your thought process, and you defend your conclusions. With increasing frequency, Redglare agrees with your deductions. You glow when she tells you “very good.”

When the meal is finished, you clean anything that has been dirtied while Redglare packs your belongings. The last thing you do before leaving that night is prepare your swords. Redglare has a proper set of caneswords, crafted for her hands and durable enough to last her whole life span. Your caneswords, while deadly, are toys in comparison. You breathe deeply, longingly, as Redglare checks her weaponry.

From that moment of departure on, the rituals are complete, and you have to think on your toes just as much as Redglare does. You are on the hunt in pursuit of foul criminals, the worst of Alternia’s worst, and the hunt leads you across every mountain, valley, plain and ocean that the planet has to offer. Your role is to mainly to metaphorically watch (literally sniff) as Redglare works, getting a feel not only for how she carries out her duties, but also for how the position functions. You thought you knew everything about legislacerators when you joined. You were wrong.

The only place you and Redglare are absolute equals is in battle. Your swords and your body may be smaller, but when it becomes necessary to attack or defend, Redglare is not there to protect you, nor are you to protect her. You are partners, and with your combined strength you lay waste to all who dare oppose you. When you were a wiggler, you dreamed about taking the majority of your captives alive so that they may stand trial, which was the fun part. As a Neophyte, you hope they die, because dragging a screaming criminal back to a courtblock intrudes on your time with Redglare, and makes your rituals seem awkward and clunky rather than flawless and reverent. Still, a Legislacerator is not meant to be brutal or cruel; simply effective. You honor that as best you can.

When the trail stretches on for empty miles, you talk. You have discussions that last for hours. You debate law: what is and isn’t a crime, and why. Redglare listens to what you have to say with a lip-covered smile, even when you express your most radical ideas. 

“A Legislacerator can never choose to disobey the law, but she can choose to not believe in it,” Redglare says, with one hand resting on her hidden necklace.

As the night grows old, you find a place to sleep. Redglare makes arrangements for lodging with a single recuperacoon, a gesture which is economical and ceremonial, and one of the biggest surprises you faced when joining the legislacerators. She procures food, and you prepare the night’s last meal, while Redglare performs her own meditation.

Over dinner, you don’t discuss the crime at hand. This is a time to let those thoughts go, let them stew, age, or whatever metaphor you choose to use. Redglare asks you about your home, your friends, your lusus who never hatched. She discusses her friends, both on and off the Force, and the lusus she lost in the line of duty. When she speaks of Pyralspite, you almost feel pity for her.

After the meal, there is still some time before sunrise, but a Legislacerator with a Neophyte has many preparations to make. You set your clothes aside and ensure they are as clean as possible. If anything is too unsightly, it will be your duty to treat it tonight and wash it tomorrow. (As for rips, Redglare helps you sew them up, but she isn’t supposed to. It’s your little secret that she helps you.) Then, Redglare takes a shallow basin of water and that same towel you used that evening to wipe away the slime and washes herself with the same slow, methodical strokes you used to clean her hours ago. You sit, naked, and try not to flush too deeply as you smell not just her body and its movements, but her pleasure as she almost performs for you.

Then, it is your turn. Redglare rinses the towel, takes your right arm, and extends it to its maximum length. Then she brushes the cloth—room-temperature, but to your cool blood it feels warm—from your shoulder to your fingertips. She repeats the motion, slow and even, until your whole arm feels clean and fresh. Then she cleans your other arm. And your back.

And after that… sometimes, the cleaning takes a turn that may not truly be traditional for Legislacerators grooming their young Neophytes, the way that meal preparation and cleaning and meditations are. Whether the practice is orthodox or not, you crave it. It at least validates the arousal you feel when Redglare runs her soft, towel-covered hands over every inch of your body. After a week of this ritual, you lost control of your body and bulge once, the muscle unsheathing and seeking contact. When you realized what had happened, your face turned teal in shame until Redglare rubbed the towel in a soothing circle on your stomach and entwined her fingers with the tip of your bulge.

“What should I do, Neophyte?” she said to you. “Advise me on a course of action.”

“…I would request more information,” you avoided stammering, but barely. Her fingers were so light.

“I have been presented with my beautiful Neophyte’s aroused bulge. What should I do?”

Your blush deepened. “I—I would continue to… to clean her… and touch her as you please.”

You smelled Redglare’s smile—this time wide and toothy, giving you shivers—and she coaxed your bulge into her hand, where she teased you without mercy. You had no no ritual or tradition to guide you, so you trembled and lay back and gasped and chirped freely, some part of you still clinging to the notion, She’s cleaning you. This is just cleaning.

You knew it wasn’t. She knew it wasn’t. But she wrung an orgasm from you that scrambled your mind and made tears gather at the corners of your burned-out eyes. You lay there, panting and boneless, as Redglare finished her duty and cleaned you off, and by the time your neurons stopped firing in all directions and started to resemble normal thought once again, Redglare was offering you her hand to help you into the recuperacoon. You took a few shaky steps and joined her in the sopor, and you slept with her arms wrapped around you.

You have a lot of unspoken questions. You wonder if, when Redglare was a Neophyte, her Legislacerator liked to erotically tease her during cleaning. You wonder if Redglare did this to all her apprentices—you had thought you were her first, but Redglare is so confident that this must not be her first mentorship. It doesn’t happen every night, either. Most nights, nothing remotely intimate occurs. Sometimes Redglare toys with you, caresses and fondles you while you feel like the most special troll in the universe, and spends what feels like hours pleasuring you until you are a helpless, twitching mess. Sometimes, Redglare uses your body for her own pleasure, sliding her bulge into your nook or coaxing you into hers.

When the cleanings turn erotic, Redglare always brings her impeccable professionalism and at almost excessive intervals asks you to advise her on her course of action. Should she keep touching you? Should she kiss you? Should she fuck you? Are these advisable courses of action? When the answer is “no,”—whether you want her to merely touch somewhere else or stop completely and let you sleep—she listens and praises you for “an excellent deduction.” She’ll even go into sopor without satisfying herself, with her bulge exposed, and you wince thinking of the intense slime against such sensitive flesh. It’s not a comfortable way to sleep, but rather than pressure you, Redglare braves the recuperacoon.

On nights like that, Redglare hums for you odd, mournful songs that she calls hymns, to which she later teaches you the words. She’ll mutter her convictions in your ear and tell stories of long-dead rebels that the Empire executed. She tells you of the mother, the scribe, the slave, and the mutant.

“He is the one born to suffer…” she croons in your ear, early in the morning as sleep closes in on you. “He was the one born signless and in death became the sign of revolution. He was born with tortured blood, and he will be born again. He will correct the injustices of blood and liberate us. Find him… Protect him… Because I didn’t…”

When she whispers like that, you can barely breathe. The past dances in your mind like a movie full of bloody colors, and you dream of them and all their struggles. In the daytime, sometimes you can persuade Redglare to tell you more about her necklace. It takes a thousand questions, but she confirms to you that she knows so much because she heard a sermon of his once, and she kept an ear to the ground and collected scraps of scripture, meeting other heretics in the shadows. Redglare mostly keeps her beliefs to herself, but you glean details. You know she wants you to carry on her work and protect the Sufferer’s prophecies. For some reason, you believe that you will. You don’t think she’s a heretic after all; you think she’s right. And you’re burning with curiosity to meet a troll who has candy for blood.

After all is said and done, your mind and your heart contradict each other in defining your relationship to Redglare. Logically, you are a willing partner. You chose to become a Legislacerator. If that dream ever changed, you could drop out and at least avoid culling. When you are with Redglare, you are a willing partner and assistant, and when it comes to physical intimacy, you express continued affirmative consent that you feel comfortable revoking at any moment.

But your heart tells you that you are Redglare’s plaything. Her servant, her sidekick, her pet, her toy, you don’t care what she calls you so long as you’re hers. You are clay that Redglare molds in her image. You are an empty vessel that she fills with her intellect, wisdom, sexuality, and faith. You just want to hold more and more of her inside of you, as much as you could possibly fit.

The only discordant note in this symphony of physical, mental, and emotional resonance that you feel with Redglare is when you are off duty. A Legislacerator pursues her quarry to the ends of Alternia, but after a trial is complete, sometimes the assignments are a little dry and the law enforcers are permitted a perigee to spend on vacation. During the rests, your Neophyte status is irrelevant. You and Redglare are simply two trolls entering the same military order.

You hadn’t expected the difference to hit you so hard until you found Redglare at a bar one night, surrounded by her friends, all of them loud and rowdy. Redglare swung her glass of soporific around and called to you, “Oh, Terezi! Good to see you! Hey, pull up a chair, meet my friends!”

You sat, because you had no idea what else to do. You’re still accustomed to Redglare’s insightful and authoritative orders, but that image is crumbling already. Sandwiched between two adult trolls who you couldn’t care less about, you watch Redglare as she laughs and jokes around. You can’t help thinking, This is not my Legislacerator. And of course, it’s stupid to expect her to behave in identical ways on and off duty, but… she was too different.

You bide your time and look for an opportunity to get Redglare alone; from how well Redglare knows you, you’re certain she has inferred your discomfort. Just a few touches to your forehead and a wave in front of your nose and Redglare herself asked, “Need some air, Terezi?”

You clenched your jaw when she called you ‘Terezi,’ but you nod and stand, and Redglare helps usher you out onto the street.

“It gets pretty rank in there, I should’ve warned you,” she said with a laugh. “My bad.”

You wanted her to stop laughing like that. You wanted her to call you Neophyte and ask for your advice and opinion and question you, make you think, make you grow. You wanted to kneel before her and submit yourself to the intricate labyrinth of her whims, a maze you could never tire of pondering.

“Look, if you wanna talk to me about something, we should do it when we’re back on duty, okay?”

“Why?”

“This is my time to relax! I don’t have to worry about anything right now. I can just have fun and chill with my buddies. You should, too. Some of your friends live around here, right?”

You sniff suspiciously. Nothing about the Redglare before you was recognizable, familiar; was this a persona? Was she telling the truth, and your perception from before was incorrect?

Redglare was staring at you, and you could smell her fidgeting: leaning into one hip, tapping her toes, playing with her hair.

“You realize… you’re one of the youngest Legislacerators in history,” you told her. “You took high-profile cases while still a Neophyte and set the record for the youngest promotion.”

“Gah, you’re gonna make me blush!” Redglare laughed. “I’m just really good at what I do, is all. You’re really good too, Terezi. I believe in you.”

“Why don’t you call me Neophyte?”

“Uh, because we’re off-duty? Look, all those rituals are so stuffy, you can’t expect anyone to do them every night of their lives! Don’t you want the chance to just treat me like a normal troll, too?”

You frowned a little harder, and realized that you wouldn’t get anything out of Redglare if you just listened to her words. You had no desire to treat Redglare like she was normal. She may be flawed, full of regret, and a heretic—far from perfect—but none of that made her normal. It made her extraordinary, and you wanted to acknowledge her exemplar existence every minute of your life, the way she acknowledged yours when she called you Neophyte Pyrope and praised your deductions.

“May I… check for something?”

“Sure, I guess.” Redglare shrugged.

You reached out a hand and placed it right between her rumble spheres, and slowly pushed your fingers upward, feeling for the iron edge of her pendant. The instant your fingers brush its weight, you skirted to the side and traced up to her collarbone and away. No one watching would be able to tell that you had felt a necklace.

“You would only take off your sign if you stopped believing in it, wouldn’t you?” you asked her.

“Man, you’re into some heavy shit,” Redglare laughed again. You were quite accustomed to her laugh, but not this often. “Yeah, my sign’s important. I always wear it.”

“Because it’s always true.”

“I mean, sure. Why are you making such a federal fucking case out of this?”

“I’m just trying to find out more about what it means to be a Legislacerator,” you told her. “Especially one like you.”

“You wanna be like me, Terezi?”

“No, I don’t,” you offered her your largest smile. “I want to be better.”

You told her to go back to her friends; you’d find your own way home, and that’s what you did. You avoid Redglare in your time off now, and never mentioned that chance off-duty meeting even once you returned to the hunt, returned to your rituals, even returned to the private moments of ecstasy you share and never speak of afterwards.

You understand a bit more about Redglare now. She swears that the casual off-duty persona is her true self, and while it’s inaccurate for you to say that the ruthless enforcer Legislacerator is the real Redglare, you know that she feels more herself on-duty than off. This work is her life, and in this life she feels more connected to the things that matter: justice, logic, and her faith that the red-blooded mutant will hatch anew. Besides, between her position as the wild card of the Legislacerators and membership in a secret cult, Redglare needs to ensure that everyone thinks she is precisely who she says she is, and nothing else.

When you figure this out about your mentor, you feel proud, somewhat. It’s easier to look at her off-duty and not feel disgust for her carefree antics. But as your apprenticeship continues, a small fear appears on the horizon, only to grow. Soon, you will be expected to take cases solo, and initiate from Neophyte to Legislacerator yourself. You worry that you will not be finished drinking in the knowledge, energy, and wisdom that Redglare pours into you , but you know that if you stay alert and receptive that should not come to pass.

What you actually fear is losing your claim to call her yours. Your mentor. Your Legislacerator.

All that is left for you is to keep your metaphorical eyes open. Enjoy the perfectly orchestrated, surprise-riddled life you share with her on the open road. If you pay attention, you may find an opportunity to preserve your bond.

“Good evening, Legislacerator.”

“Good evening, Neophyte.”


End file.
